


Looking down on creation

by sixthletter



Category: Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Implications of torture, Just... everything you'd expect from a Loki-on-Sakaar fic, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 16:58:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12988440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixthletter/pseuds/sixthletter
Summary: Being a mind reader at an orgy is exhausting.





	Looking down on creation

To say that Loki sees himself in the Grandmaster would be wrong. For a start, the Grandmaster is palpably insane, and Loki is fine now.

\- 

Loki’s gold ring isn’t as big as Draupnir, and it isn’t nearly as well made, but when whacked against something with sufficient force it can be convinced to duplicate itself, and that duplicate will stay realistic-looking for long enough that whoever it is given to will suspect theft rather than trickery once it vanishes. 

Besides, 90% of any lie is confidence and, as a man who had just spent four years with a very real, very limitless amount of wealth at his fingertips, Loki is extremely adept at projecting the aura of a man with more money than sense.

Not that he ever _had_ more money then sense. Loki is an infinitely sensible man. But Odin, may his name live forevermore, had really started to dodder by the time Loki took over, and a sense of continuity is important to the little people in times of change.

It’s also possible that, while taking his rightful place on the throne and erecting a befitting memorial to his heroic (if somewhat hectic) youth, Loki may have replaced Asgard’s established courtiers with people too stupid to be impressed by anything other than money. And he suspects the Grandmaster, with his makeshift palaces and ostentatious holograms, may favour a similar breed.

It’s a common tactic, that’s all. Everybody does it. It’d practically be crass not to.

\- 

Once he’s made it off the ground floor and into what he mentally terms the new money parties, it becomes clear that the key to advancing further is the ability to be having a good time, all the time, and to be willing to help others along.

And again - Loki wants to make this clear - it’s not what he would have done had he been king himself. He was, one may recall, the model of a sober and judicious monarch while Thor cavorted on earth with that woman and wailed and rent his hair over that thrice-damned hammer. But! In _extreme_ circumstances, such as when one has to usurp one’s ailing father and don a guise for the greater good of the realm, nay, _all_ realms, to promote freedom and end war, then, in those very specific circumstances, he may have encouraged a certain… looseness among the new courtiers. 

They were happy with that, obviously, because they were a pack of hand-picked idiots who wanted nothing more than free gold and the chance to chug wine older than their entire lineage. 

Loki didn’t really make them do anything they didn’t want to. 

He’s not a monster.

Well, ok, _yes_ , technically he _is_ , genetically. And granted, there may have been a certain amount of public shaming and exiling of quote-unquote heroes during his and Odin’s transitional period, but Asgard gets boring after the first thousand-odd years, so in many ways banishment is a blessing.

He’s never _melted_ anyone. That would be uncouth.

-

He saves the magic until he’s invited to the better parties: producing invitations from the air with a flourish, applause that scatters fireworks, drinks that change colour and never end, shades of doomed contenders conjured for the safe and inebriated to coo over and marvel at. 

And then, the game.

“Let me tell you what I think you want,” Loki says, sprawling with someone influential-looking on a seemingly endless series of divans and chaise longues. And then he leans closer, slips one hand up to cup their flushed face, and gently, ever so tenderly, plucks the most obscene thing he can find from their minds. 

The parties are, without exception, the sort of parties where that very thing could happen. Loki finds himself invited to lot. 

-

Being a mind reader at an orgy is exhausting.

Odin, for all his failings, did appear to love his wife, and was at least discreet in his lapses. This is not the sort of party Loki is used to. It is not the sort of party, if he’s honest, that he particularly enjoys. But if the road to glory is paved with indecency and washed with the collective sexual effluvia of a hundred ill-matched species, well. Loki is nothing if not practical. And he is nothing if not good at pretending he wants to be by someone’s side.

-

It is the game that gets him into the inner sanctum. Word is delivered by a embarrassed-looking guard with the distinctive white facepaint of the favoured and, under it, the expression of someone whosincerely hopes that they will not have to explain the sort of party they are issuing an invitation to. 

Fitting himself out in the Grandmaster’s colours may be presumptuous, but frankly during his Odin years Loki had taken that kind of obvious favour-currying as a sign of low intellect, and until he’s more intimately acquainted with the Grandmaster this seems like a reasonable posture to assume. 

In return, the Grandmaster greets him with gratifying enthusiasm. “The _threads_ ,” he says, making a gesture that encompasses Loki and, admittedly, several other people. “Such flair. Such mystery. Is that skin, you know, _organic_?”

“Grandmaster,” Loki begins, “can I say what an honour it is to -”

“I have heard about you, yes indeed!” the Grandmaster continues. “We may be flying high up here but we get word of these things on the ah, sweet winds that rise from the, um.” HIs brow creases as he seems to remember he lives on a floating rock covered in filth. “Well who knows where they rise from? But like you, like all of us, whoo, up they come.”

“In your wisdom, I’m sure you know many - ”

“And I say to myself, you know what I say? I say, ‘this I gotta see!’ This ah, freedom that you give people to, you know, get loose. I mean, I try, but really there’s only so much the perfect host can do with a narrow mind, mmm-hmm. But now! You’re here! And we’re going to have a great time.” 

The Grandmaster smiles the full, honest, uncomplicated smile of the insane. Loki does not think about where he’s seen it before.

A vast set of double doors swings open to reveal a chamber full of writhing shapes. As Loki watches, they resolve themselves into individual creatures, most of them beautiful and all of them expensive looking, awkwardly copulating to music with no discernible rhythm. They look awkward and tense in a way that suggests they, too, are going to have ulterior motives, and will perhaps try get in the way of Loki’s natural rise to supremacy.

(Odin-Loki would have rejected them out of hand as entirely too shrewd to be at court. He would have banished them. He would not have moved them all to a suspiciously high, suspiciously windowless room and kept them all in a state of intoxicated, erotic terror. And maybe that’s an uncharacteristic failure of imagination on his part, but Loki likes to think it’s just good management. Keeping these people lubricated, in every sense of the word, must be a terrific drain on funds.)

“So anyway,” says the Grandmaster, shedding his complicated-looking robe with practiced ease, “let’s see what you can do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Say hi [on tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/rumpotential).


End file.
